Deep Fire Rising - v4 (3 page)

They retreated west around Sebesi Island to circle far around the still-erupting volcano. And for the next eighteen hours, the plucky steamer fought the waves and wind, the rippling tsunamis that continued to radiate from the epicenter, and the ash that didn’t so much as fall from the sky but seemed launched directly at the ship.

The sun remained hidden by a pall of soot. The darkness was more complete than any night, darker than any cave. It was as if Monday, August 27, 1883, never came to the Sunda Strait.

Six more times the ship was struck by lightning, and once more she would battle a killer wave as Krakatoa erupted the last time. That final collapse of the caldera was the weakened rock at the rim of the volcano plummeting into the half-mile-deep crater, finally sealing the aperture into the earth’s heart.

The day before it had taken the
Loudon
four hours to travel from Anjer to Telok Betong. The return trip took twenty. Approaching the Java coast south of Anjer, the steamer ran parallel to the shore amid a sea of flotsam — ash, ripped-up trees and more bodies than anyone could count. The coast, once verdant jungle and productive plantations, resembled a desert. The scattering of villages had all been wiped away and those few survivors had yet to return from the hills where they’d fled.

If anything the damage to Java was worse than what they had witnessed on Sumatra. The city of Anjer, home to ten thousand people, was gone.

Han wrote furiously in his journal as the ship plowed through the morass. Wherever he looked, bodies poked through the undulating blanket of ash, most stripped naked by the tsunami, some burned horribly by the near-molten pumice.

The only thing keeping him from being driven mad was the physical act of writing. His quill flew across the pages as if the speed of his hand would allow the image to flow from his eyes to the page and not seep into his memory. Yet when he closed his eyes the glistening wall of water hovered in his consciousness, poised to overwhelm him.

Han had never seen the oracle himself — that honor was reserved for the high priests — so he didn’t know how such an accurate prediction as this could have been made. Some of the retired watchers said the oracle was a woman rumored to be two hundred years old. Others speculated that the oracle was an intricate machine that could detect the earth’s faintest tremble. Priests somehow interpreted this information to foretell the future. Still others believed it was a gift of prophecy bestowed on a succession of children, like the reincarnated spirit of a lama.

Han didn’t care to know the truth. He had witnessed the oracle’s precision and would never do so again. He understood human nature enough to know that even if he had warned the inhabitants of the Sunda Strait only a handful of people would have been able to save themselves. Still, the burden of seeing the death and destruction was too much. He would let some other watcher complete the journal he carried.

It was titled
Pacific Basin 1850-1910.
Understanding that the oracle foretold this cataclysm thirty-plus years ago sent a chill through Han’s body worse than the deepest frost of winter. He prayed this was an aberration, that the oracle had been right just this one time. It had just been his bad luck. That was all. The next prophecy would doubtless be wrong. It had to be. Nothing could predict calamity.

In the front of the ledger were a series of letters sealed in wax. Nine of the ten envelopes had been opened; he had opened the latest one when he left for Batavia four months ago. That meant there was one more great disaster coming in the next twenty-three years.

He was prohibited from breaking the wax seals that hid the time and location of the next disaster. Watchers only opened the envelopes for the events they themselves were to witness. The last envelope was to be opened on January 1, 1906, which would presumably give a future watcher enough time to reach his destination. With a jerk Han snapped the wax seal and read the yellowed text.

The date was meaningless. Just a day, a month, and a year. April 18, 1906. The coordinates meant nothing either. More numbers. But some resourceful cartographer had written in the name of the town that stood at the epicenter of what would be one of the worst earthquakes in history: a city called San Francisco, California.

M
ercer woke with one thought on his mind. Seven uninterrupted days. He’d been working without a break for six and a half weeks. And in the past seven months he’d managed just one four-day weekend and a few stray days to himself. This was going to be his first real vacation in over a year. His second thought was that when it was over, he’d be returning to the Canadian Arctic, where he’d spent the past month and a half. He was facing at least another four weeks at an isolated mining camp thirteen hundred miles north of Montana. De Beers was looking to invest a further half billion dollars in the newly discovered diamond fields and was waiting for Mercer’s final test results and geologic report.

He’d been able to wrangle the time away because the rotary blast drill used for boring test holes had been so damaged by the brutal cold that Ingersoll-Rand was sending a team of mechanics to repair it. The hard reality of working in the Arctic was that while men could be insulated from the weather, steel became as brittle as glass. They’d been lucky no one had been injured when a main bearing detonated like a grenade.

It wasn’t unusual for Mercer to be away from home for months at a time, trotting around the globe prospecting, assaying, and troubleshooting for different mining companies. His expertise in geology had made him wealthy, although the price was very little time to enjoy it. So when he could string together enough consecutive days for a vacation, he liked to maximize every moment. Still, he procrastinated for another half hour under a feather duvet before swinging his legs out of bed.

The tan he enjoyed from a scuba-diving weekend in the Bahamas had long since faded. His lean body was as pale as a marble statue, the result of the Arctic’s twenty-two-hour nights and the exhaustion of continuous fifteen-hour work shifts. The only color came from his hands and forearms, which were darkened by ingrained dirt that wouldn’t wash out, and a dense bruise on his shoulder where a twenty-foot length of drill string had caught him.

Mercer’s home was a three-story brick rowhouse in one of the few sections of Arlington not yet turned into high-rise office buildings. He’d bought the building years ago and converted the six apartments it once contained into one home; it was difficult to see the extent of the remodeling from the outside because he’d left the original façade untouched. His bedroom was located on the third floor and overlooked an atrium that took up the front third of the house. On the second floor were two guest bedrooms, the family room, which was actually a bar modeled after an English gentlemen’s club, and an open space he used as a library. On the ground floor was a little-used kitchen, the dining room, where he kept a billiard table, and his home office. A spiral staircase restored by an architectural salvage firm in Connecticut connected the three levels.

The town house’s eclectic style and decoration reflected its owner, and because of his travel schedule Mercer had made certain it had become the anchor his life needed. He considered it one of his only real indulgences.

He’d arrived home from Canada at four in the morning and had been asleep for ten straight hours. Afternoon light spilled through the skylight above his bed and drifted over the balcony at the edge of the mezzanine. Mercer threw on a clean pair of jeans and an old Colorado School of Mines sweatshirt. His luggage lay stacked at the foot of his bed.

He’d remembered to set the automatic coffeemaker behind the bar before collapsing but had planned on waking at noon. The two-hour-old brew was as thick as tar. Perfect.

Since he rarely used the kitchen, he kept some groceries in the cabinets under the back bar and set about making a bowl of cereal. He didn’t think about the expiration date on the milk until the first cottage-cheese-thick curd landed in the bowl. Gagging at the smell, he poured the mess down the bar sink and cursed his house sitter. The orange juice in the rebuilt lock-lever refrigerator he stocked with beer and mixers was just as old.

Harry White, Mercer’s eighty-year-old best friend and the man who Mercer was convinced put the crotch in crotchety, knew he’d be home today and was supposed to have done the shopping. Harry tended to treat Mercer’s town house as his own, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He had the domestic skills of a rabid wolverine. In the trash can were a dozen empty Jack Daniel’s bottles and about ten cartons’ worth of cigarette butts.

Mercer had been gone six weeks and felt it could have been worse. At least Harry had gotten his mail and had taken his phone calls. There was only one message on the answering machine. He hit the PLAY button. “Dr. Mercer, this is Cindy from Dr. Cryan’s office.” Mercer’s dentist. “I’m just calling to remind you of your cleaning appointment Wednesday at ten.”

He ran his tongue around his mouth and decided his teeth weren’t in immediate danger of falling out. He’d reschedule for when he got back from Canada next month.

Sipping his coffee and thumbing through the stacks of mail, Mercer was grateful that Harry hadn’t repeated last year’s trick of putting him on a handful of pornographic mailing lists. He hadn’t been able to look his mailman in the eye until that mess had been straightened out. Delving deeper into his pile, he realized Harry’s distorted sense of humor had been in full swing after all.

Not only had he brought over junk mail from a half dozen of his cronies, he’d meticulously shuffled Mercer’s important stuff in with wads of credit-card solicitations and other garbage. The trade magazines were hidden inside catalogues for companies Mercer had never heard of. It would take an hour just to separate out his own stuff.

The phone rang. “Hello.”

“Hey, Mercer. You’re finally out of bed.” Harry’s voice, the result of sixty years of chain-smoking and hard drinking, grated like a diesel engine on a cold morning.

“Yeah, I didn’t get home until four. Wait, how’d you know I was asleep? Where the hell are you?”

“I came by a couple hours ago when you were sacked out,” Harry breezed, a lungful of smoke hissing past his lips. “I came back a little after noon. I’m downstairs in your office on line two.”

Mercer checked his phone and saw the light for the fax line was on. “I should call the cops and have you arrested as a Peeping Tom. Why didn’t you get milk, you bastard? You knew I was coming home today.”

“I did buy milk,” Harry protested. “To save time I got it two weeks ago and brought it over yesterday. It’s right in your fridge with the OJ you wanted.”

“And it was lumpier than my cereal.”

“Gripe, gripe, gripe.” Harry pitched his voice as high as he could. It still rumbled like a longshoreman’s. “This milk is too sour. This milk is too lumpy. Jesus, you’re worse than Goldilocks. Hold on. I’m coming up. I need a drink if I have to listen to you bitch about every little thing.”

Mercer was smiling as he set the cordless on the bar. In the ten years since they’d met, he couldn’t recall a single nice word between them. Nor could he recall a denied favor either. Harry was the other anchor in Mercer’s nomadic life, an unlikely friend who meant more to him than anyone he’d ever known. That one was more than twice the age of the other had never had a bearing on their relationship. Both had recognized early on that their personalities ran parallel and seamlessly transcended the generations. Mercer was very much the man Harry had been forty years ago and Mercer supposed, and occasionally dreaded, that in a few decades he’d be like Harry White.

In the moments it took Harry to climb the antique staircase that coiled up to the library adjoining the bar, Mercer had a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale waiting.

The two men were the same height and roughly the same build, although gravity was shifting the breadth of Harry’s shoulders into a potbelly. Where Mercer’s eyes were sharp gray, Harry’s were a sarcastic blue. His face was as lined as a topographic map and his silver hair remained as stiff and full as a shoeshine brush.

Harry sported his traditional uniform of baggy pants, an overlaundered white oxford that showed the outline of the T-shirt underneath, and sneakers. A mid-March chill forced him into a light windbreaker.

“Welcome home,” Harry greeted, taking a seat at the bar in front of his drink. He hooked the sword cane Mercer had given him for his last birthday on the brass handrail. Although he’d lost a leg decades ago, the walking stick was still more of an ornament than a necessity. “Jesus, you look like the main course at a vampire convention. When was the last time you saw some sun?”

“I knew I should have gone on another diving trip rather than stay home and take your abuse—” Mercer paused. He heard a strange sound that seemed to be climbing the spiral staircase. A sort of click, click, shuffle, wheeze.

The clicking stopped while the wheezing continued. It sounded like something had reached the top of the wooden stairs and was moving slowly across the carpet in the library. Mercer looked to Harry. Harry swiveled to look through the French doors that separated the bar from the reading room.

“Come on, boy,” he rasped. “It’s okay.”

A moment later, Mercer’s eyes widened. “What the hell is that?”

“A dog, for Christ’s sake. What do you think it is?”

“If I had to guess I’d say an overstuffed sausage.”

The basset hound seemed to understand he was the center of attention. His tail gave a feeble wag before drooping back to the floor. He was as long and round as an old canister vacuum cleaner and so bowlegged his belly rubbed the floor. His frayed ears dragged like neglected laundry as he tottered into the room. The old hound’s bloodshot eyes complemented the gray fur on his muzzle and the silver string of drool coming from his slack lips. Mercer put the dog’s age somewhere between fifteen and fifty. “They say that people look like their pets, Harry. That poor thing’s gonna have to get a lot uglier if you two are gonna be twins. Where did you get him?”